Raft: Tooling & Infra Update

A computer scientist working in open source towards a more hopeful future.

Posted on 2015-07-23, around 3 minutes of reading.

In preparation for the forthcoming 0.0.1 release of Raft we've taken several forward steps to improve our (already pretty darn cool!) tooling and infrastructure. If you attempt to set up any of these on your own and have issues let me know! I'd be more than happy to help. You can find our .travis.yml here.

sudo-less

Travis CI released their container infrastructure last year, and we finally started using it! We'd tried before however we struggled with packages, as Cap'n Proto has rather demanding dependencies for a C++11 compiler.

In case anyone is looking, here is the secret sauce on how to build Cap'n Proto on Travis CI without root:

addons:
  apt:
    sources:
      - ubuntu-toolchain-r-test
    packages:
        # Needed for building Cap'n Proto.
      - gcc-4.8
      - g++-4.8

# We need to install Cap'n Proto.
install:
    - git clone https://github.com/kentonv/capnproto.git
    - cd capnproto/c++
    - ./setup-autotools.sh
    - autoreconf -i
    - ./configure --disable-shared
    - make -j5
    - export PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)"
    - export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$(pwd)"
    -  cd ../..

Now that we've flagged sudo: false in our .travis.yml our Travis wait time for a build have significantly decreased. Some of our test builds take under 1:45 minutes!

Moved to travis-cargo

Huon created the fantastic travis-cargo crate and we recently moved over to it! This helped clean up the .travis.yml a bit and opened the door for us to utilize future improvements. This took our .travis.yml script section from this:

# Generate Docs
after_success = "|"
  [ $TRAVIS_BRANCH = master ] &&
  [ $TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST = false ] &&
  cargo doc &&
  echo '<meta http-equiv=refresh content=0;url=raft/index.html>' > target/doc/index.html &&
  sudo pip install ghp-import &&
  ghp-import -n target/doc &&
  git push -fq https://${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/${TRAVIS_REPO_SLUG}.git gh-pages

To this:

# Load `travis-cargo`
before_script:
    - pip install 'travis-cargo' --user
    - export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

script:
    - travis-cargo build
    - travis-cargo test
    - travis-cargo bench
    - travis-cargo doc

# Generate Docs and coverage
after_success:
    - travis-cargo doc-upload
    - travis-cargo coveralls --no-sudo

With travis-cargo our builds are more thorough, clear, and featured. It handles uploading our documentation, code coverage, benchmarking, and the whole kaboodle.

Code Coverage

You may have noticed the travis-cargo coveralls --no-sudo above and wondered what that was. http://coveralls.io/ offers free code coverage analysis to open source projects. You can see what ours looks like here.

We're currently sitting at:

Coverage Status

Code coverage. Wow! That's not bad! We hope to improve this as we go.

@homu

We also adopted the friendly robot homu to be our repository gatekeeper. If you've been around Rust or Servo you probably know bors, homu is a rewrite of bors.

homu acts sort of like a pre-commit hook, testing pull requests just before they're merged. Much of the work to get sudo-less builds was in preparation for homu since we wanted it to be fast!

With homu guarding the master branch we can be sure that Raft will stay "green" on tests unless I manage to accidently push to master, or one of our dependencies breaks.

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